Recently Published Reviews

In his book Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) (click here for review), Paul Binski writes perceptively about the complexity, quality, and originality of the sculpture of Reims cathedral. In his estimation, this body of art, from its corbels to its tympana, sets new standards for architectural decoration in subject matter, formal adventurousness, and expressivity. For the art historian wishing to probe Binski’s claims in greater detail, the sculpture of Reims provides a set of archaeological and interpretive challenges that are simultaneously compelling and daunting. One must look both… Full Review

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed several publications devoted to individual Chinese paintings. They hark back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Sherman Lee and Wen Fong collaborated to write Streams and Mountains Without End: A Northern Sung Handscroll and Its Significance in the History of Early Chinese Painting (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1955) and Chu-tsing Li wrote The Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains: A Landscape by Chao Meng-fu (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1965), two monographs that helped frame the study of Chinese painting in those and subsequent decades. The present crop of monographs on single… Full Review

Suffusing his working process, his subject matter, and his address to the viewer, violence is central to the montage-based work of the German artist John Heartfield. It is on clear display, for example, in the missing limbs, firearm, and prominent vagina dentata with which he and his fellow Berlin Dadaist George Grosz assembled the sculptural self-portrait The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture) in 1920. One witnesses it also in his 1928 poster The Hand Has 5 Fingers promoting the German Communist Party’s “List 5” in the upcoming Reichstag elections by way of threat, with a tremendous… Full Review

After eight years of intense study, research, conservation, and planning, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s former Islamic Art galleries were reinstalled and opened to the public in November 2011 under the name The Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Navina Najat Haidar coordinated the reinstallation, with contributions by many members of the Department of Islamic Art, including senior colleagues Daniel Walker, Michael Barry, Stefano Carboni, and Sheila Canby. Almost twelve hundred objects are now on view in fifteen galleries, organized chronologically from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries, and covering a vast… Full Review

Until several years ago, Richard Spear’s 1971 exhibition catalogue, Caravaggio and His Followers (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art), defined the scope and limits of Caravaggio’s influence on painters in Rome and beyond. But since 2010, more recent exhibitions commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Caravaggio’s death have offered the opportunity both to evaluate new discoveries in the individual careers of Caravaggesque painters and to discuss anew the large and disparate group of followers. Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy is the fourth and last of a linked series of exhibitions dedicated to Caravaggio and Caravaggism, an initiative of FRAME… Full Review

Photography in Africa has long had a dual role as a tool of explorers and colonial officials and as a new “modern” object that slowly worked its way into the daily lives of many African peoples. It has been used extensively to document fieldwork in Africa, and in turn the photograph as a material image has become an important topic of study. Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, a collection of essays edited by Richard Vokes, is a valuable addition to the growing library of books about photography in Africa—which also includes Erin Haney’s Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion Books… Full Review

Shipwrecks have long attracted salvagers, archaeologists, and historians, offering precious but fragmentary evidence of broader cultural, political, and economic networks. The Westmoreland or Westmorland (so spelled in deference to early Spanish orthography and established scholarship), a British merchant ship that sailed from Livorno for England during the War of American Independence in 1778, was not sunk but captured by French frigates and escorted to Málaga, where her passengers were taken prisoner and her cargo—including books, prints, drawings, pictures, sculptures, music, fans, lava samples, and Parmesan cheeses consigned by British travelers—was confiscated as spoils of war. The story would have ended… Full Review

Yukio Lippit’s fine book examines the ways in which certain leaders of the Kano house (or school) in seventeenth-century Japan adapted to competition and enhanced the prestige of its painters and, ultimately, of the painting profession as a whole. By the 1600s, the Kano were part of a society in which warriors had placed their status group at the top of a rigid social hierarchy with some room for movement below but not up into it. The structure was not, however, all-encompassing, nor did it absolutely determine matters of prestige, wealth, and influence. Members of the nobility and monks, for… Full Review

A major exhibition of Édouard Manet’s portraits was already a gleam in Lawrence Nichols’s eye from the time in 1992 when he joined the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA). What sparked the idea was the handsome portrait of Manet’s close friend, Antonin Proust (1880), donated to the museum in 1925, having passed through just one French collection after that of the sitter. The TMA’s portrait project was developed into a collaboration with the Royal Academy in London, where the active participation of MaryAnne Stevens gave it the particular character revealed in the catalogue and essentially in the larger, London version… Full Review

Jagged peaks surrounded by swirling mists, pavilions perched precariously on cliffs, wise old men walking along winding, narrow paths: such motifs may conjure the stereotypical image of a traditional Chinese painting for many contemporary viewers. Indeed, many of the fifty-odd works displayed in The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China fit this bill. Yet the curators of this exhibition—Peter Sturman, Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Susan Tai, Elizabeth Atkins Curator of Asian Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art—successfully narrate the politics and human emotions invested in such landscapes… Full Review

The first painting viewers see upon entering the Los Angeles County Museum’s (LACMA) elegantly mounted exhibition, Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy, is an anomaly in the Baroque master’s oeuvre. One of the very few portraits that is now securely attributed to Caravaggio (after years of debate), it depicts Cardinal Maffeo Barberini who eventually became Pope Urban VIII. The youngish cardinal is shown seated against a typically Caravaggesque shallow and dark background, wearing delicately sketched, diaphanous sleeves and bisected by a sinuous, horizontal streak of red satin along the inside of his sober but sumptuous robes. Along with… Full Review

Originally published in 1979, Vicente Lleó Cañal’s Nueva Roma: Mitología y humanismo en el Renacimiento sevillano represented a breakthrough in the history of Spanish art. Along with Jonathan Brown’s Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Nueva Roma was among the first sustained discussions of the social and intellectual bonds forged among Sevillian men of letters, artists, and patrons. Lleó also charted new territory by exploring how humanistic learning informed local architecture, painting, sculpture, and broader aspects of visual culture. In the decades since the book was originally published, scholars have made great strides in… Full Review

In 1839, when François Arago first presented the photographic processes of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Nièpce to the French Chamber of Deputies, he declared photography’s utility to the field of archaeology. Thus, photography’s link to archaeology was recognized almost from the outset. In his new book, Photography and Archaeology, Frederick N. Bohrer specifically argues that photography maintains an archaeological way of seeing. As these fields developed through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bohrer argues, they symbiotically influenced each other in a number of ways. He focuses mostly on the roles of photography in the “object-based” practice of archaeology… Full Review

Near the end of her new study on the group portraits of Henri Fantin-Latour, Bridget Alsdorf notes: “The history of nineteenth-century French art is a field fascinated by movements and collective politics, yet still dominated by accounts of singular artists and oeuvres. Although we depend on groups to give structure to history, as artists depended on them to provide camaraderie and support, it has proved difficult to imagine the artistic self as formed fundamentally by way of others” (227). Her book Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting goes a long way toward rectifying… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue for Diego Velázquez: The Early Court Portraits is the third published in an ongoing partnership between the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. Each year visitors to the Texas museum are treated to a new, small exhibition that centers on a work brought to the United States from Spain. El Greco and José de Ribera starred in the first two installments of this series, and in 2012 it was Velázquez’s turn, represented by the Prado’s important early full-length Portrait of Philip IV (ca. 1623–28). The choice could… Full Review